On Health with Houston Methodist
On Health with Houston Methodist is for the health conscious, curious and even skeptics out there. Each week, our hosts are joined by a Houston Methodist expert to explore an everyday wellness trend or significant health topic.
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On Health with Houston Methodist
Burnout: How to Spot It & What to Do About It
Burnout has become one of the hallmarks of modern life. Nearly half of workers worldwide report the feeling, a percentage that’s been rising steadily since the pandemic blurred the line between work and free time. But what exactly is burnout? How can you tell when stress becomes something more serious? And why does it seem to be spreading across so many professions and age groups? In this week’s episode, we explore the roots of burnout, its effects on mind and body and what it takes to restore energy, purpose, and balance.
Expert: Dr. William Orme, Psychologist
Notable topics covered:
- The three defining characteristics of burnout
- The professions, personality traits, age groups most at risk
- Are you burned out — or do you just not like your job?
- The art of knowing how to say “no” in the workplace
- The 42% rule: the time your body and brain need to spend resting
- It’s not a medical condition, it’s an occupational phenomenon
- The warning signs you may be experiencing burnout
- What to do when you’re burning out, but quitting your job isn’t an option
- When should you see a mental health professional about burnout?
If you enjoy these kinds of conversations, be sure to subscribe. And for more topics like this, visit our blog at houstonmethodist.org/blog.
♪ ♪
ZACH MOORE:Welcome to On Health with Houston Methodist. I'm Zach Moore. I'm a photographer and editor here, and I'm also a longtime podcaster.
TODD ACKERMAN:I'm Todd Ackerman. I'm a former medical reporter, currently an editor at Houston Methodist.
ZACH:And Todd, have you ever experienced burnout?[Laughter]
TODD:Yes I have. As you know, my previous job was in the newspapering game for some 40 plus years, and the daily grind of that takes its toll on you. I think pretty much everybody burns out in journalism.
ZACH:I mean, you lasted a long time though, 40 years.
TODD:I did. But I could argue that I had burned out some significant portion of that. The exception was, like, those just seemed to have sweet gigs in life. There was few of those in the newspaper business, but most of us just doing the grunt work day in and day out, it really took a toll. So I'm curious, how about you? I often wonder about your generation feeling burned out.
ZACH:Yeah, for me personally, I've been through a few phases of my career now. Like, I started in live TV, and that -- I know if I had stayed there, I would've definitely gotten burned out, right? And I did my own thing for a while, you know, which was great, but that takes its toll too because everything is on you. And then as far as my position here, like, at Houston Methodist, there's a lot of variety in it, so I find that refreshing… TODD: Right. A lot of creative outlets like this podcast for example. So, I have found that as long as you're keeping things fresh, it can help. It's the monotony that really starts to wear away at you. Now, of course, every job, anything you do really has monotony to it, right? That's a percentage of it, right? But that can't be the overwhelming percentage. That's been my experience. And I think maybe speaking to my generation as you put it, you know, "If you love what you do, you're never gonna work a day in your life," I think that got drilled into us at a young age, and I think that is inaccurate, Todd.[Laughter]
TODD:I think there is some truth to that. My point is when you're burning out, you're no longer loving what you're doing.
ZACH:Well yeah, I guess it's chicken or egg thing at that point, yeah, yeah. But during your burnout periods, did you feel like you burned out and you came back or is it, like, a cycle of burnout, or do you think it was just, "Okay, I burned out, and then there's no going back from that." For you personally?
TODD:I think it was somewhat gradual kind of game.
ZACH:There's no way to, like, restart that fire at that point once you burn out? TODD: Yeah. For you.
TODD:I mean, a lot of it your professionalism -- I thought my professionalism could cause me to rise above it but still, I just felt exhausted. I don't know that I felt like I wasn't good at my job anymore…
ZACH:Mm-hmm.
TODD:It seemed like a lot of work.
ZACH:Yeah. Well, there are a lot of factors to burnout, a lot of ways that people experience it. And who do we talk to about that, Todd?
TODD:We talked to Dr. William Orme, a clinical psychologist at Houston Methodist.♪ ♪Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Orme.
DR. WILLIAM ORME:Yeah, thanks for having me.
TODD:We're here to talk about burnout, an increasingly relevant subject it would appear. Tell me, how prevalent do you think burnout is?
DR. ORME:I think it's widely prevalent. I think recent, sort of, statistics place it on the order of, you know, it really varies per group that you look at, but I think on the lower end, they put it around 30% up to as high as 50% of people endure some of the key criteria for burnout, so I think it affects a lot of people.
TODD:Kind of a silent epidemic?
DR. ORME:I mean, I guess if you think of an epidemic as something that affects a vast majority of people in our culture. I mean, if it goes up to 50%, that's a lot of people that struggle with this.
TODD:And often don't seek any help about it?
DR. ORME:I think that we're in a culture that probably it's more likely that people will just think that there's something wrong with them, or they're not pushing hard enough, or they're not grinding hard enough, and everyone else is doing it. So, you probably got a lot of people that are more apt to blame themselves for this and actually miss the fact that there might be a bigger thing going on here.
TODD:So, maybe just to start, define burnout for me.
DR. ORME:Yeah, so burnout is defined as a state of chronic overload of stress, and there's really three key features to that. It's an emotional exhaustion, a sense of detachment or depersonalization. So, basically when you're at work, you don't really feel engaged, you don't feel like you're yourself. And then a state where a reduced feeling of efficacy at work, so, you feel really ineffective. So, you're exhausted, you're kind of checked out or more distant from your work than you usually are. You start to feel like,"I'm not performing."
TODD:And the common cause is just overwork essentially? Feeling overworked or…
DR. ORME:I think that that's a big question about the cause and I think you could make two errors here. One of the errors would be to say,"This is just an organizational issue, it's just something that's going on with a toxic work environment." That certainly is a part of it. There are certainly such things as more toxic work environments than others. If somebody's struggling in one environment, you put them in a different environment that's more healthy and they may not struggle at all. I think that's one piece of the puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle is it does seem that there are individual differences in how people respond to these work cultures. And there are some people by virtue of various protective factors that may not experience burnout as much as somebody else does, so I think it's a both/and. I think it's a combination, an interaction really of a person within their environment and the particular nuance that comes from that.
TODD:Yeah, that's what I meant when I, kinda, said they feel that they're being overworked, or they feel easily stressed. DR. ORME: Yeah. I mean, their subjective experience is, "The demands of this environment are too much, and I can't meet them, and so I'm checked out and I'm shutting down." So, is this something of a modern phenomenon? I wonder about in, like, the 40s and 50s if people were feeling this? You certainly don't -- When I watch old movies or something, I don't ever hear people talking about it like I do now.
DR. ORME:Yeah, that is a great question, and I think that's a really interesting question that I don't know the answer to. But I think there is some evidence to suggest that burnout goes down with age, actually. The more experienced somebody gets in their career, they're less likely to experience burnout. So, it could be that younger generations now are more vulnerable to it than older generations. So -- but whether there were broad cultural differences, I'm not sure but it does seem to be more in the dialogue now.
TODD:How about the pandemic? How did that affect it? It seemed like a lot of people decided to check out because they felt burned out at the time.
DR. ORME:I think about burnout as, I guess, you could reduce it to a bit of a simple equation. Maybe this is too simplistic, but if you think about it as demands exceed resources that somebody has to bring to the work environment, then if the demands go up in the environment, you know, then the likelihood of burnouts gonna go up. In the pandemic, I think we saw the demands in the work environment for almost everyone. I mean, certainly for healthcare workers. But broadly across the working community, those demands escalated quite significantly. So, I think any sort of statistics we have about it suggest that it goes up with the pandemic. But I think there's also other factors there. I mean, I think, not the least of which is that suddenly the boundaries between work and home evaporate, right? Because everyone's working at home. Now everyone's logging on to Zoom at odd times of the day and knocking out emails at 9 o'clock at night, and there begins to be a breakdown in work-life balance.
TODD:So, do you expect it to be more and more of a problem as the workplace becomes so remote?
DR. ORME:I do think that's a -- I think that's a challenge. I think that's a real challenge because one of the individual factors that would predispose burnout is somebody who might struggle to set boundaries or say no, and set limits on the demands at work. Again, that's not to blame it on them but if they get better at that, it can really help. If work is all remote and virtual, and work is everywhere now, it just gets so much harder to set those limits.
TODD:So, what populations does it afflict more than others?
DR. ORME:Again, coming back to this formula of demands exceed resources to bear. If you think about both sides of that equation being demands, and then the resources. Basically any environment that is highly, highly demanding in terms of the work, you're likely to see higher rates. I mean certainly that's the case, we know for sure with healthcare workers. I mean nurses, doctors, frontline workers in the healthcare system experience that significantly.
TODD:And it's a daily grind to it, right?
DR. ORME:Yeah, yeah. And usually, I mean, I think there's a lot to that. Usually healthcare workers, it attracts a certain sort of person that is very devoted to their work and likes to take care of people, and will go the extra mile for people, and that's reinforced. And so, it attracts a certain sort of person that's willing to go the extra mile and may also struggle to put boundaries on that caregiving impulse. So, I think high demand environments are certainly at greater risk but also, if you look at the other part of the equation, people that don't have as many resources are also at risk as they -- or those resources are eaten up with other things are at higher risk. So, if you think about minority groups that are facing more complicated work situations, discrimination, bias, they're having to deal with all of that in addition to the complex work challenges that are there, their resources are gonna be more maximized than someone else. So, any under-resourced population, really, you would expect to have more burnout.
TODD:And how about, like, personality traits? Like, you mentioned someone really devoted to work. How about, like, perfectionists? DR. ORME: Yeah. They're -- there's some clear line of research on type A personality, so you know, the personality type that is hustle, hustle, hustle, get it done, achievement-oriented, fast."We're gonna meet these demands, and we're gonna meet them, and we're gonna meet them by white knuckling through it and getting after it," those individuals are at higher risk for burnout. But not necessarily the middle-aged. I always kind of thought of it as something as you go along with the grind for a certain amount of time and then suddenly it, kind of, wears you out.
DR. ORME:Yeah, I think go back to that equation like demands exceed resources. I think that people with more work experience, they often feel like they have more personal resources to bring to bear on the demands at work. So, usually over the course of a career, you develop more skills and expertise, those are resources now that you bring to bear on the demanding work environment. You know, a part of burnout is that feeling of lack of efficacy, lack of effectiveness. So, if you are really good at your job because you developed those skills over the amount of time, it's probably a protective factor against experiencing some of these things.
TODD:I've read that young people, or Generation Z really feel it. That kind of surprised me just'cause I thought it would be -- burnout would be a product of time in the workplace. Why are they feeling it?
DR. ORME:That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. One idea would be that the younger generations, when they look out into the economic landscape, they feel more stressed. I mean, they're facing higher costs of living, it's harder to break into the housing market, inflation, geopolitical turmoil. One theory would be that they're just facing a different landscape than other generations faced as they enter the job market. That's more uncertainty, uncertainty breeds more worry and anxiety, more worry and anxiety zaps personal resources, so. Another thing could be generational differences around value. Some folks in the younger generations, they want more balance in their lives, and so they might be more prone to, sort of, those values clashing, coming into organizations that are very performance-driven and highly emphasizing careers as the key identity in somebody's life.
TODD:So, I've also read that surveys show that most people don't identify the workplace as their primary cause for burnout. Do you see that and what things then do they cite as burning them out? I guess just day-to-day living?
DR. ORME:What I see as a clinical psychologist, I see people talking about work stress quite a bit. The thing that I don't see necessarily is always appreciating the way that that work stress ripples through and affects other areas of their lives. So, it may not be attributed to work stress. They might be aware that what's going on at work is stressful. They might not be aware that that had a determining role in the conflict they just had with their partner, you know? And that doesn't surprise me. As a clinical psychologist, I think it's a rare thing to have someone who always knows what they're feeling, why they're feeling that way, and can parse that out. I think most people that come to therapy don't know that and that's more of a normal state. For most of us, we'll get irritable, we'll snap and we're not sure why, but then we'll backward engineer it and kind of figure it out on the back end. So, I think that burnout can affect people in ways that they don't even realize until they have time to reflect on it, but most people who are burned out don't feel like they have time to reflect on it.
TODD:I think just a lot of things pile up on you besides the workplace. So, for me I often -- just like, even if it's not work stress, work is taking up so much of my day and then there's all these other things I have to do. A former colleague of mine after he retired said that, you know, it's a wonder we found time to work 'cause you still have so much on your plate.
DR. ORME:Yeah, yeah. I think that's especially true in our modern context where a lot of us that are working full time are balancing a lot of other responsibilities and then when that work stress piles up, the pie of resources goes down for all these other areas and it becomes more difficult to manage those things.
TODD:So, we touched on this before but I guess I kinda wanna focus a little bit on whether employers are doing enough to prevent burnout. How much is personal versus how much is corporate?
DR. ORME:Yeah, I think that's a great question. Again, I think you can make those two errors. You could say, "This is all the work environment," or you could say, "This is all just a personal problem." But I think both of those would be reductionistic. I think it's more fair to say that the problem lies in the interaction of those two. And because of that, the solution also lies on both of those levels that you could have organizations do things to reduce the likelihood of burnout in their workforce. You can also, and this is what I see,'cause I'm a clinical psychologist and I work with individuals. I also see people come in in very adverse, challenging, difficult circumstances, and they make shifts, and they do better, and nothing has changed in the environment, but they come to adapt to it in a different way, in a way that's much more effective, and it really improves the quality of their life, and that gives them power to do it. So, I think it's a both/and. I think on the work side of things, whether employers are doing enough probably varies a lot per organization. I think we have a wonderful organization here at Houston Methodist. And I'm not an organizational psychologist, but there's a lot that can be done on the organizational side. Making sure that workload is appropriate, clear expectations, not micromanaging people, also not leaving them hanging out to dry without any direction. You know, there's a lot that can be done on that corporate side.♪ ♪
TODD:After the break, more with Dr. Orme about burnout.
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TODD:Now, burnout's not considered a medical condition, is that right? DR. ORME: No. It was recently added to the International Classification of Diseases, the ICD 11 as an occupational phenomenon. So, it's not technically a medical condition, but it is recognized as a syndrome that's really context dependent. In the DSM, which is our manual for classifying mental illnesses, there's something called an adjustment disorder, which is different from burnout, but can be related. An adjustment disorder is basically anxiety or depression that comes in response to a concrete stressor. And then when that stressor goes away, so does the anxiety and depression. So, sometimes burnout can fall under that classification of a mental illness, but right now it's kind of conceptualized as different, though I do think it can intersect our physical health for sure. Yeah, I was about to ask that. It's kind of something you think of as a mental, emotional thing, but it can have physical symptoms as well, is that right?
DR. ORME:Yeah, and I would say as a psychologist, rarely do I think about emotions as separate from our physical bodies. I really think about an emotion as an embodied physical process to something like stress or anxiety. It has a physical signature and it may be different for different people. Some people might get a headache versus another person might get tense shoulders, another person might, like, have an upset stomach. But it releases cortisol through the HPA access, I think even in -- people with burnout, they found higher levels of blood cortisol in those folks. So, any emotion is going to have a physical signature and when it comes to burnout, that wearing down of stress and anxiety and overwhelm, that can wear down a body in all sorts of different ways.
TODD:But it's pretty much all over the map. There's not some, like, general things that you would say tend to appear more often in patients you see?
DR. ORME:Well, I think there's definitely a sense of fatigue that sets in, but I think in the literature and the research that's been done on burnout, there's wide ranging effects. I mean, it can affect your GI sympt -- I mean, like, think about immune function -- immune functioning goes does with chronic fatigue and stress, chronic stress, so people are more susceptible to physical illnesses. But I think it also has been -- increases the risk for cardiovascular disease, people get -- headaches, I think are think are pretty common. People have very individual responses to stress in their physical bodies.
TODD:What are good ways for people to know how to spot burnout? Particularly since it seems so common and normalized.
DR. ORME:I would say, sort of, the early warning signs would be good to pay attention to. If you notice yourself becoming a bit more cynical or disconnected from your work, not caring as much. If you're a person that really cares about your work and you find yourself coming into work not caring as much, that's probably, like, a warning sign that a sense of detachment is starting to set in that might be a response to overwhelm, lower morale, missing work, decreased motivation, decreased commitment. I think all of these are sort of warning signs there, you know, should be raising the awareness that we might need to pay attention to this.
TODD:And it should be, kinda, clear that it's you're burning out rather than you just don't like your job. And a lot of people just, kind of, flippantly say,"I'm burning out," and I don't know if that would meet, sort of the definition of what psychologists might see as burnout.
DR. ORME:Yeah, I think those could be different things. There's such a thing as a person not being a good fit for a particular role, and then decide that they want to take a different career direction. That may be very different from being in a work environment that is overly taxing and drawing out some issues with responding to that. So, I think those can be different. That's where I think it's helpful to pay attention to the signs when they come up so that you can avail yourself of resources that are there to figure out what's going on.
TODD:I read about the 42% rule that that's the percentage of the time that your body and brain need to spend resting, so that would be, like, 10 hours out of every 24. Is that food rule to go by?
DR. ORME:I have not actually heard about that rule, but that sounds very reasonable to me. I mean I think we are -- we're not a culture that is all that good at embracing slowing down and resting. We're in a very competitive environment and people bring that -- you know, the workspace is a very competitive workspace. And so, it's not necessarily always a workspace that is focused on, "How we rest and recuperate and take care of ourselves?" So, erring on the side of taking care of ourselves, getting enough rest, physical nutrition, sleep, that makes sense to me.
TODD:So, give me some tips to prevent burnout. You mentioned one, learning -- saying no to certain assignments. Is there an art to knowing how to do that?
DR. ORME:Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds so simple it's almost trite, but it's not a simple thing. I mean, people work on this in therapy. They dedicate a lot of time to wor -- and it is very hard -- and I think, like, if you take healthcare workers for example, to say no sometimes means that they are going to have to feel some level of guilt that they could be doing something for another patient that they're not. That is a tough thing for people to sit with. And so, it's almost easier for many people to just overextend and do the thing rather than to sit with the gnawing guilt of feeling like they're not taking care of somebody that they should be taking care of. Another thing that happens, and I think we see this quite a bit is that what can often happen is there's a problem in the system, there's an organizational problem, and you have an eager employee that is very devoted to their work. The problem in the system filters down to their level and they become aware that,"If I overextend myself and overfunction in the system, I can be kind of a stopgap." But it's obviously not sustainable. It leads to them chronically overextending and then feeling just worn down by doing it. And it may, you know, stave of the problem for a while, but eventually, they're gonna crash or they'll get irritable and they'll snap at somebody, and now HR's getting on them, and they're getting written up. So, it just can get into a really negative situation. The other issue with that is that the problem in the system needs to be addressed, and the more that they overfunction to be the stopgap, that problem never really comes to the fore. So, I think that saying no means sometimes tolerating those feelings. It maybe means that, "Shoot, there's gonna be a problem that comes to the surface here and I can't really control that." In the literature, there's this thing called internal locus of control, external locus of control. The more you can pay attention to self-regulation rather than trying to manage or control your environment, the less likely you'd be to burn out.
TODD:I think there's also -- some employees would have a fear of saying no just for political reasons internally in their workplace. DR. ORME: That's a reality now. Yeah, yeah. Usually when people can't say no, there's some distortions there in their thinking like,"It's bad to say no. I'm hurting somebody by saying no. I'm missing the mark. I'm falling short." So, they can be helped by adjusting their thinking about,"This is -- It's better that I come to work as a rested and fully present employee if that's gonna be better all-around for my patients rather than to be running on fumes." The analogy that people use a lot is putting the mask on yourself, the oxygen mask on yourself first rather than on your kiddo. You know, you have to be good, and you have to be safe and healthy for you to take care of people in the work environment and do your job well, so have to be able to be able to reframe some of these things. And then I think a big part is recognizing that it's going on. Again, I think people are more likely to think,"There's something wrong with me. I'm not pushing hard enough. If I just push harder, then it will be okay, and I just need to find that within me." Or, "I should be better at my job to get it done faster and more efficiently." DR. ORME: Totally."The problem is me and if I just were different. Look at my colleagues, they're doing it." And so, if they can pause on that and see, like, hold on a second, this is dealing with bigger forces that are at play, then they can think,"Okay, now how do I respond to this tricky situational dynamic? So, how about like, just taking short breaks during the day? Is that something you urge patients to do?
DR. ORME:Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's -- the short breaks to re-center, to refocus, there has to be a way to, sort of, ending your work day and not picking that up until the next work day. You know, there has to be some sort of boundary or limit on your work so that you can go home and recharge, and that becomes a blurry boundary for a lot of us.
TODD:What sort of prioritizing needs to be done immediately and what is not a higher priority, or breaking large tasks into smaller, manageable ones, is that something you talk about?
DR. ORME:All of those things that you're mentioning are, like, solution-focused ways of coping with difficult work circumstances. So yeah, actively talking with your manager about the workload and what's going on is a wonderful thing to do. I think the hardest environments are when people become aware that the expectations, they may not be able to meet those expectations'cause the expectations are unreasonable. So, part of actually responding to this situation is getting good at letting down people in a graceful way.
TODD:How about something just like eating lunch at your desk versus going out?
DR. ORME:That's probably a personal preference, but I could see some people that just getting out of the work environment to get a breather would be a breath of fresh air. I could also see somebody sitting at their desk and that being recharging. So, it would be this question about, like, how do you, in the middle of the work, stress, slow down, re-center, collect yourself, and then refocus on the task at hand.
TODD:So, what do you do when you think you're burned out? And especially if, like, quitting your job isn't an option. You need a paycheck every week so you need to keep working.
DR. ORME:Yeah, what do you do? TODD: Yeah. Well, I think that, again, if people are listening to this, it's good that they can recognize that this may not be going on just because you're not trying hard enough. This may be more complex that than. And there actually may be resources available that they don't know about that they could resource themselves with. Again, back to that equation, demands exceed the resources. You have two levers. You decrease the demands or you can increase the resources. There are many employees that maybe aren't aware of resources that are out there that could actually help them. I know, like, through Houston Methodist, they have a number of different EAP programs to support the mental health of the people that are in the organizations. So, there's a lot out there in other organizations. There might be those similar resources. People can't avail themselves of those resources if they're just thinking,"It's just something I gotta buck up and get through." You know? There has to be an ability to say like, you know what? Sometimes it takes strength to say, "You know what? I need help, and how else can I get some resources to bring to this?"
TODD:When's a good time to see a mental health professional about it?
DR. ORME:I think when you start to notice that it's starting to affect your job performance, or your morale, or you start dreading coming to work. Certainly if you start missing work. If you start coping in more destructive ways that are gonna start snowballing and having more of an effect on things, if you start going to substances or if you just find yourself in endless scrolling loops on your phone when you get home and you're not getting other stuff done in your life, that's when we start to see, sort of, functioning starting to break down. And that's when -- I mean, it would be ideal if you could see somebody and talk about it before that happens, before it gets to a breaking point like that.
TODD:So, when patients come to you, what do you tell them? How is this best treated?
DR. ORME:It's usually treated by talking with people about the circumstances that are going on. A psychologist is able to help somebody become aware of both how they're thinking about the situation and helping them notice other features that are going on in the situation that might help them say, "Oh wow. I hadn't realized, like, the intensity of the stress that I'm up against here." It can help by talking to somebody, it can help come up with new ideas about how to respond. People tend to be predisposed to burnout that have a more avoidant style of coping so any way that you can start to face the stress instead of avoid it, it's gonna go better. And so, therapists can really help people learn how to face that stress and get a more direct approach style of coping rather than distancing from it, which is the normal thing to do, by the way. There's no judgment on that. But it's just -- it tends to be that if you can shift and pivot toward facing it head on, it's probably gonna go better.
TODD:Is it something that you consider pretty treatable? I mean, seems to me some of the things we talked about like an individual's tendency to blame themselves might be pretty deep rooted.
DR. ORME:Yeah, I think some of those things are pretty engrained, but I do think it's very treatable and that's probably because that's what I see. I see people come in, they talk about what's going on. In the discussion, they start to get ideas about,"Oh, I don't have to -- I actually don't have to say yes to that, I could actually say no to that." And then they start making shifts and what I see is them feeling much more resourceful, much more empowered, and I think it can get better. Sometimes it opens up things, you know, sometimes it opens up that there can be some background factor, or family factor, or developmental factors that come into play that then they want to addresses those. But I do think the issue of burnout is very treatable.
TODD:Okay, so is there anything about burnout that I didn't ask that you would want listeners to know?
DR. ORME:I guess I've said it but I guess I would just reiterate it that a lot of people, I think, they could talk about the stress in the environment and they even have, you know, some things to say about the work environment, or their colleague, or their boss, and deep inside, they often feel like,"I'm to blame here for it." And I think I would just encourage people to not too quickly go to that. This is usually a more complex thing than just,"I'm bad, I'm wrong, I'm not doing it hard enough, I'm not trying hard enough. I'm just not strong enough." I would say take heart, like, if you are experiencing some of these symptoms. Oh yeah, and by the way, like as many 50% of people are, so you're not alone. This is not abnormal, this is something that if you're in a particular work environment that's pretty healthy, your next job, you might be facing some of this. So, just because you don't experience it now, you might experience it in the next place you go to. So, this it pretty normal for people to struggle with so there's no reason to feel ashamed about it and that's what I would have to say.
TODD:Very good. Well, I appreciate you taking time to talk with us about this, very educational. DR. ORME: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.♪ ♪
ZACH:So, Todd, what was your biggest takeaway from your conversation with Dr. Orme?
TODD:Well, I don't know if a takeaway, but the thing that surprised me most was that he claimed that burnout is not a middle- aged sort of thing.
ZACH:It's not a midlife crisis situation.
TODD:Yeah. You know, in my experience a lot of us in journalism, it's like for a while, the adrenaline rush was fun, and at some point it seemed to beat you down, and I don't think that's unusual in the workplace that there's the point at which you've been doing this for so long it just becomes a grind.
ZACH:Mm-hmm.
TODD:So, I thought of it always kind of as a middle-aged thing but he emphasized that people often, by that point, learn coping skills.
ZACH:Mm-hmm.
TODD:So, maybe I was never that good at that.
ZACH:But even in the act of those coping skills was exhausting probably too, right? So, it all stems from the same place, really. Yeah.
TODD:That's why I was curious about if, you know, your experience or your generation's experience. I've been surprised that Millennials or Generation Z even more that they are already feeling it.
ZACH:Well, they're just lazy, right?[Laughter] You know, I was always told I was Generation Y when I was growing up, and now that's just been absorbed into Millennial. So, I am an older Millennial, believe it or not. Which makes me feel, I guess, young still, but also like,"Hey, I'm not a Millennial. Those are kids." But, we're all getting older too, so. No, it is strange when you're young, you really don't have that perspective you have when you're old, obviously. So, like, "Oh man, I've been doing this for five years," like five years is nothing, right? When you're older and you know, you hear someone say,"Oh man, I've been at this job for three years now." I'm like, "Well then just bear down and, you know, stay with it," right? That's something Dr. Orme mentioned too, like -- which I found interesting. Who is more prone to burnout? Who's gonna white knuckle it and, you know, not share how they're feeling and just bear down and do it. And you burn out faster that way. And there are certain demographics based off studies that people are more prone to it.
TODD:Yeah. Ambitious, high charged fields, perfectionists. I always felt like I was that, so that causes you to take more time on something so. Which of his tips did you like?
ZACH:Well, you know, I think you brought it up actually, that 42% rule, which I had not heard of before and -- TODD: Nor him. Yeah.[Laughter] So I thought that was interesting. I had not heard that before, and we live in such a time where people wanna put numbers, and stats, and percentages, and data on everything, right? Like, that's a good place to start, right? 42%, which means 42% of your 24 hour day needs to be not work.
TODD:And kind of down time. ZACH: Yeah. You sleep maybe, if you're doing well, seven to eight hours. That gives you, like, two to three hours which you can just, kinda, kick back and, you know, take it easy. Do you find that you're doing that most days?
ZACH:Depends on the day. I think some of the struggle of keeping that 42% rule would be, and you guys talked about it, right? The post-pandemic era, right? People work from home, you don't like go in to a place of work and clock in and clock out anymore. Now, that's not saying every career was like that before the pandemic, but especially afterward. Jobs where you used to go in, you go to the office, you leave, it's not the case anymore. You get up, you turn on your computer, it's work, right? And like, oh, you're at home, you got your laptop,"Oh let me answer some emails tonight. Let me get ahead on tomorrow's work," right? And that starts creeping in, you know? And that's where I find that 42% slipping away.
TODD:Yeah, for me, you know as we've discussed before, I had this shoulder surgery, and so I had therapy exercises for that, and then getting to the gym, my off hours can get away. So I -- but maybe those work out hours do count as kind of decompressing. ZACH: Mm-hmm. In my mind, I sort of like I gotta get this, I gotta do that. And so…
ZACH:Right. Also interesting to note, burnout is not a medical condition, it is an occupational phenomenon.
TODD:Yeah. That's an interesting term.
ZACH:Yeah. Boy, that's some terminology for you right there, occupational phenomenon. It makes sense though.
TODD:A better way -- a little later he referred to it as a syndrome. ZACH: Syndrome. That sounds more medical. And it doesn't really surprise me. It takes a while for these things to become medical conditions. ZACH: Mm-hmm. And even that one is -- I don't know if I really think of it as a medical condition, would you?
ZACH:It's tricky, right? The more we learn about how our minds and bodies are all interconnected, like, there are correlations but I don't think -- yeah, I would agree with you. Like, there are certain things I would say,"Oh yeah, that's a medical condition." But being burned out on something?
TODD:It just seems like a term for chronic stress. That doesn't really seem like a medical condition as a sort of causative factor of.
ZACH:I understand why it has not been -- like, now that I think about it, I understand why it has not been labeled a medical condition yet. But, you know, as, you know, we continue to learn stuff about how the body works. Like, you know, PTSD used to not be a thing, right? We called it shell shock. So, maybe… TODD: It takes a while. We'll have a term for this in 30 years. We'll see. But hopefully burnout won't be a thing in 30 years. You would think as technology evolves, it's supposed to help us and alleviate, you know, out work load, our stress, that sort of thing, but it's a double-edged sword and sometimes it makes it just as bad.
TODD:I'm not really optimistic that it's gonna go away.
ZACH:That's what AI is for, Todd.
TODD:Well, that's true, maybe that'll help. You know, we talked a lot about how it was, like, a product of the pandemic and working remotely, but I noticed this well before that more with first pagers but then especially iPhones cause you were never separated from work. You always had your iPhone on you where your boss could get a hold of you. ZACH: Mm-hmm. Like, always connected. That connectivity is a double-edged sword, right? Right.
ZACH:I know when I'm on vacation, I'm still like,"Hey, if something happens, call me." And I answer it and I don't think about it, but that is not a true break from work. I don't know, what's the line there? I don't know, right?[Laughing]
TODD:Well, I do the same thing on my vacation. I will plug into my computer and if someone needs something I will figure I'm there to help them still. The emphasis I think Dr. Orme and others I read is that's not a good thing to do. You need to just, like, take a break where you're not thinking about work to recharge. So, maybe you and I should have that dual resolution...
ZACH:Well, we're gonna -- better close the laptop and…
TODD:Right. ZACH: Get on that 42%. But -- all right, well that's gonna do it for this episode of On Health with Houston Methodist. Be sure to share, like, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We drop episodes Tuesday mornings. So, until next time, stay tuned and stay healthy.♪ ♪